It's kind of odd that a small microcontroller IC costs less than a LEGO brick. As if injection molding is a more expensive process than semiconductor fabbing.
Reasons include automation cycle time and base process parallelism, warehousing cost, shipping cost, distribution cost, manner of use.
Basically a LEGO brick is expensive because when being fabbed it is part of a relatively small volume (single color) injection run with limited parallelism, has to be 'manually' handled to be retrieved and packed, and then is effectively a large block of air requiring inefficient shipping, storage and retail presentation around the world. Changing the injection machine out to a new material means down time. Changing the mould takes even more time. Every SKU needs new retail packaging design, documentation and assets. Direct to consumer retail leaves scope for fat margins. Primary USP is "unique IP".
Whereas an MCU is tiny, can be fabbed in hugely parallel process, is designed to be packaged and distributed in a space efficient tape which remains trivial to consume en-masse owing to its automation-friendliness. Industrial sales leave little scope for fat margins. Primary USP is "functionality and reliability as supply chain component at competitive price point".
A bunch of manufacturers are nowadays equal to Lego quality (and beat them in other qualities, e.g. recently Lego really seems to struggle with color consistency). Not always easy to find out what a certain set manufacturer uses (they often buy the bricks from someone else), but e. g. Gobricks (afaik used by Panlos) and whatever Bluebricks Pro uses are really good.
My kids got a few MEGA Bloks sets when they were younger, and 1/1000 is an incredibly generous description of their tolerances. Things just... didn't stick together consistently. They'd just fall apart.
No. Lego is expensive, because it’s luxury toy brand. There many many guys analyzing this topic, here is one of them: https://bricknerd.com/home/greed-or-inflation-an-economic-an... Long story short: each year new sets contain less parts AND cost more.
The piece you cite does not support your conclusion; it is an analysis of Lego’s price increases on existing sets, and concludes that they are, in fact, inflation-driven. The only thing it says relevant to your conclusion is mostly dismissive of it as viable for Lego, though indicating its outside the scope of the article (quote: Another way around this is “Shrinkflation” where companies provide slightly smaller goods at the same price as before in an attempt to disguise the price increase, though when LEGO fans closely judge sets by size and piece count, this is harder to pull off. That’s an article for another day.)
I found very good metric somewhere: part count in all of the season sets vs. price. I don’t remember where, but there was writing, that while part count was decreasing, price increasing. And the best deal was too look for ~decade old used sets. They were bigger and feature rich. But I am not into buying anymore, I have hundreds pounds of it from last 3 decades.
And it’s hard to compare Lego bricks and semiconductors. Lego is not that hard, they only use special, a bit more expensive injection molding machines with pressure sensors. While even cheapest Padauk chip needs very very expensive foundry.
